


Tip the Hourglass

by ParadifeLoft



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Brief and/or Implied Mentions of Violence, Gen, Implied Character Death, nobody is happy ever, post-Nargothrond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-31
Updated: 2013-01-31
Packaged: 2017-11-27 16:03:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/663882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadifeLoft/pseuds/ParadifeLoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><cite><q>How long do you think you can go before you lose it all? Before they call your bluff and watch you fall? I don’t know but I’d like to think I had control, at some point; but I let it go and lost my soul.</q></cite> - A Moment of Silence, Streetlight Manifesto<br/>Curufin and Celegorm are, in chronological order, humiliated, wounded, expropriated, and killed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tip the Hourglass

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a Giftmas present for [Lise](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Lise), who requested a focus on Celegorm and Curufin's relationship and extra points for after Huan leaves and everything is sad. As if I could resist either more points or more sadness.

A collection of mottled, fading bruises ringed his brother's neck.

The sight made him almost sick to his stomach, from recognition of fear and from the fury set churning in it both. He might not have even been this far along the path to Himring, might have spent a day to regroup and then chased the human and his cursed princess down like bolting prey – _no, you would not, you would regret it_ , a small voice whispered, but it did not provide a reason and so it might have been fingerprints in the dust – but for Curufin’s determined scowl that urged them forward rather than back.

(It was not merely his determination to leave the two to follow their doomed quest to their deaths that produced that scowl and urging, for all those were his only words. One did not watch a child, a _brother_ , grow to maturity, did not follow him for centuries and trust all his council and solid devotion, not to notice when the arms round his waist and head against his back as they rode jointly in a single saddle were coursing through with bitterness and shock and fright and shame.)

On occasion he could catch a movement, his hand at his side as though closing around a hilt (a phantom hilt), and his own fingers would twitch in response with the sensation of fur between them and a solid warmth against his palm.

When they sat around the low flames, their suppers eaten but few words yet exchanged, he leaned in close toward his brother and moved to untangle the mussed locks of hair he’d ridden with since the altercation. Curufin only turned and swatted his hand away, pinched brows made deep furrows in the firelight, then stood and stalked off to their tent.

The night air was cold here (too long in the south, Celegorm thought, a sort of self-rebuking), and the trees looming overhead obscured the stars. But he didn’t wish to retire yet, despite his eyelids hinting otherwise.

Well. Cold was fitting. Rising suddenly, he kicked dirt over the remaining flames and pulled the hood of his cloak over the stinging tips of his ears. The horse shook his head in Celegorm’s direction as he passed, but Celegorm ignored his plea for attention – natural behaviour in the face of a snarling hound (nearly of its own size) it might have been, but how he'd shied away from the damned Man at such a critical juncture precluded Celegorm showing him any affection whatsoever, at least until his own mood improved.

Perhaps a time walking through the forest would calm him, he could hope at least (hope in vain); and when he returned he could hope also his brother slept, and would not turn his back to him in their bedrolls the way he had taken to doing of late.

 

\-----

 

Even amidst the clamour of desperate battle and the chaos overwhelming his forces, Curufin could see the black banner of the Enemy waving like ink spilled and staining the landscape over his brother's fortress on Himring.

He cursed them all. Cursed Morgoth, cursed the great dragon and the Balrogs and all the armies of Angband down to the last pathetic orc that gasped its last gurgling breath upon his blade.

And most of all he cursed the names of the wretched men of the east.

Curufin’s shoulder was lanced through with pain from the deep gash carved into it, and the hilt of his sword felt as though it may slip from his grasp from the blood pouring down his arm and pooling in the hollows of his palm.

But his grip was steady enough to thrust the point deep into the belly of the orc that had beset his brother - also injured, he could see in the pallor in his cheeks and the set of his jaw – from behind.

The edges of the wound blackened with the poison coating his sword as he withdrew it, and he pulled his stunned brother into a brief, rib-crushing embrace.

 

\-----

 

They passed through a village, going nowhere coming from nowhere. The Nandor inhabitants were all wan faces and guarded brows at the sight of strangers, and the place seemed half emptied of the spirits it had once held.

"There are orcs come raiding in the forests and you would fight back with arms of such shoddy construction as these?" Curufin sneered, lifting a father's sword from the hands of a young boy playing at sparring in a yard they passed.

A woman, the boy's mother presumably, stepped up to him and pulled the sword back. "Yes, we _would_ fight with them, had we need enough. If, say, our smith and his eldest apprentice had been killed; if we'd only needed such defenses in any number since the great lords in the north had fallen." The flare in her eyes could have been put under the hammer and forged into a better sword then itself.

Celegorm could feel himself shrinking as he winced. But even so, it seemed something obvious. Something good for all of them alike. He raised his eyebrows at his brother.

They stayed in the town for a fortnight following. Celegorm brought Curufin warm meals from the hearth-fires of the villagers, and they were even eaten most of the time. New swords began to leave the forge, of the best quality as could be made with the materials on hand, but even to Celegorm, more accustomed to admiring their utility than their artistry, it seemed they lacked some of the spark, some of the fire, that normally imbued such creations.

And his brother, finally emerging with the last of the swords, bore a weariness that was sapped of energy, had nothing in his face of the contentment, the satisfaction that came of pouring one's spirit into a creation and then finding it fed back to oneself, a bonfire stoked higher with added wood but then channeled, never burning beyond boundaries despite its wildness, like no natural flames ever were.

Instead, when Curufin burned in recent times, it scorched Celegorm’s eyes like the dragon-fire that drove them from their homes (scorched his lungs like swans trying to rise from the water and dragging their brother with them to the grave when they couldn’t escape). Like they’d both grown cracked and brittle from lack of rain in the interim. Everything was dry and dead at his feet, a forest too hot and still, near to combusting at the slightest provocation.

"I cannot believe you’d suggest to me to waste my time in such a disastrous excuse for a forge," Curufin had snapped, not at anybody in particular but merely because of the presence of another’s ear to be subject to it. “If I would miss anything of that accursed underground city it would be forges run by proper Noldorin smiths with an eye to proper care and layout where even the most incompetent fool I had the misfortune to encounter might put this place to shame."

His words sounded like water thrown on dying coals, smoke and spluttering hiss and no actual heat.

"You liked it better than I did," Celegorm responded idly, sipping from a wineskin. "Never minded being stuck under all that rock and only ever seeing real trees when you were out waiting to be gutted or shot full of arrows."

Even the unimpressed raise of his brow was, itself, unimpressive. “You speak as though you didn’t enjoy the skirmishes,” he said, with a roll of his eyes. At any other time, it would have brought back the baby brother who could keep himself from a scolding with dismissive words to his cousins that their claims wouldn’t be taken seriously. But now the dark lines beneath those eyes swallowed them up instead. That and something else that had nothing of a child in it at all, a flash of longing, he would have thought, but the source, there was no source, and that crawled under his skin like ugly secrets kept and grown in the dark.

“Enjoyed them in comparison,” Celegorm mumbled, a toothless annoyance. “What I really miss is Himlad. And Thargelion…” He sighed, at old memories, at how Curufin’s black mood had managed to rub off on him. No, not rubbed off; it had been lurking just below his own skin for long enough that his brother’s customary brusque manner served merely to scrape away the translucent layer covering it.

He took another long drink, and found the skin near empty. He was tempted to venture out for more, stronger, wine, but the weather made that a less than appealing prospect – the air about him now was as though before a violent midsummer storm, heat and tension and weight, yet the buffeting winds outside made it even worse.

His dreams that night were fire in a torrent falling to the earth, and hounds baying in the distance.

 

\-----

 

People had come throught this hall already, he could see, unless the nobility of Doriath were the sort to suffer smashed lamps and their glass lying inpieces on the floor under ordinary circumstances. This far in, there were fewer signs of the battle raging in the rest of the caves and forests - no blood smeared against the walls or floors, no corpses or injured - but someone had definitely come this way, and in a hurry by the looks of it.

The fool of a princeling, with his stolen treasure.

He could hear the sounds of the angry and armed Doriathrim that had followed in the halls behind them, though. It would not do to be ambushed at the wrong time...

"Go on ahead, Tyelko," said Curufin, placing a show of bored carelessness in his tone. "I'm not having that little brat vanish from under our noses while he occupies us with such an insignificant horde."

The echoes of battle grew louder outside the doors, and he could feel the acceleration of his heartbeat, the blood rushing in his ears.

“What, are you yielding all the glory to me, Curvo?” Celegorm’s grin looked more vicious than amused, the glint in his eyes like the edges of a broken blade.

Curufin might once have tried to smile back, if only briefly. “If you stayed to hold them back you'd grow careless and I might well come back to find you gutted, brother,” he said, mouth grim. No smile this time. “Go ahead. Just keep him here.”

"And if I finish him off in a single stroke?"

He hefted his sword in mimicry of a salute, and brushed his fingers over the pommel of his still-sheathed dagger. “Don't be too eager. I'll find you when there's an opening."

Something in him felt like it grew dark in that moment, cocooned in an outer layer of dark and lit from the inside with a fell searing flame.

He paused a moment, then met Celegorm's eyes straight-on.

"And then I'll rip the Silmaril from the usurping Sinda whelp's throat myself.”


End file.
